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As public sector modernization becomes a mandate, cities must evolve their core government processes to meet rising citizen expectations for digital service. The City of Mount Pearl successfully answered this call with Laserfiche, transforming the way it handles information and manages citizen services. By implementing digital forms, automating manual workflows, and migrating to Laserfiche Cloud, the city has achieved significant gains in efficiency, data accuracy, and the quality of services delivered to its community.
The city’s initial adoption of Laserfiche focused on fulfilling regulatory requirements by digitizing records and applying retention schedules in the Laserfiche repository. However, the true transformation began when the city embraced workflow automation to replace error-prone, manual processes.
“A lot of our legacy processes were manual, using spreadsheets, manually typing in information,” said Bill Peddle, records and information management officer at the City of Mount Pearl. “One of my goals when I develop a process is to remove as much manual data entry as possible, because anyone will tell you that manual data entry is your biggest avenue for error.”
This focus on automation and error reduction has been applied across multiple departments, including HR, Finance, and Permitting:
“The biggest thing is at the end of the day is, it’s not data stuck on someone’s shared drive,” Peddle said, highlighting the importance Laserfiche’s ability to capture information and enforce consistent naming and folder structure, maintaining data integrity.
A major part of the city’s digital transformation strategy involves replacing all old PDF forms with online Laserfiche Forms. One major transformation included combining six separate PDF forms into one permit application. The city also modernized their municipal elections nominations processes, as well as updating their traffic calming and inspection forms processes, among others. This shift has directly improved the speed and quality of services for residents.
Legacy forms required citizens to download, print, fill out, and then manually scan or drop off the PDF forms. Now, residents can fill out digital forms on the city website, and the system ensures they are correct and complete before submission. By making fields mandatory, the forms capture the data staff need to begin processing an application immediately. “This cuts down on that back and forth that the person who’s receiving the form has to do,” Peddle said. “They used to have to call the submitter and say, hey, you didn’t supply this or that — this just took extra time that we don’t have in city government.”
An added benefit of the new Laserfiche Forms: accessibility to a wider range of citizens. The city is incorporating Google Translate via an API into its public-facing forms, allowing residents whose first language is not English to translate the form within the application. “They’re not having to go to someone to try to figure out what the form says, which I thought was an amazing capability,” Peddle added.
The city’s goal is not just to optimize form submission, but to build end-to-end automated processes: “We’ll continue to improve and streamline,” Peddle said. “We aren’t stopping at form submissions; we’re going to be processing all of those applications with less manual error and faster speed.”
After more than 10 years using Laserfiche, the City of Mount Pearl recently had to choose between continuing to self-host or move to Laserfiche Cloud. The decision was ultimately made simple by the compelling benefits of a fully managed environment.
“The cost of a new subscription was very similar to our current subscription,” Peddle explained. “The key thing is that we don’t have to maintain all these local servers. And we don’t have to maintain all the storage, which adds up in costs.” The move allows the city to stay current on software and security updates.
According to Peddle, the benefits of migrating to Laserfiche Cloud included:
Staff adoption of the new environment has been overwhelmingly positive. The cloud interface is centralized and streamlined. “Before we had a repository shortcut; we had a Forms shortcut — now we just have Laserfiche Cloud and it has everything in one place,” said Peddle. “The pickup and the adoption of it by staff has been great.”
The successful roll-out of processes in various departments has created an internal appetite for further automation across the city. “Once you meet with the department and you provide them one process, and they see how well it runs, they’re immediately asking, ‘What can we do next?’” Peddle said.
Ultimately, the most rewarding aspect of the entire project for the Peddle is the positive impact on city employees and residents.
“My favorite thing about Laserfiche is not the software itself; it’s the feedback that I get when a process is built, and users saying, ‘This makes my work life so much easier,’” he added. “At the end of the day, that’s the ultimate goal.”
In today’s digital workplace, data is generated faster than organizations can keep up, flowing in from emails, documents, chat messages, cloud drives, vendors, collaboration tools and more. While this information should be a strategic asset, it instead becomes a burden. The sheer volume, variety and speed of data creation can leave many drowning in digital clutter.
Managing this ever-growing pile of data is like trying to shut a giant digital junk drawer that’s overflowing, disorganized and nearly impossible to control.
At the core of this challenge is the fact that 90% of enterprise data is unstructured. That means it lives in inconsistent formats, scattered across disconnected systems, and it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to find or use effectively. This data is your organization’s ghost content.
Ghost content refers to the data your organization technically owns but can’t find or use effectively—or may not even realize exists. It often hides in forgotten file shares, siloed legacy systems, outdated email threads, paper archives and even on personal desktops. It can also be locked away in unsupported formats or buried within outdated workflows, which makes it invisible to the business, school or municipality and inaccessible to the people who need it most.
When left unmanaged, ghost content quietly drains productivity, increases compliance risks and keeps valuable insights out of reach. Employees waste precious time searching for misplaced or mislabeled information and frequently end up recreating existing content, leading to duplicated efforts and increased chances of errors.
Beyond operational inefficiencies, ghost content risks serious compliance threats. Without proper visibility and governance, sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) may be stored without the right access controls or audit trails, exposing organizations to legal liabilities and regulatory violations.
Data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), along with state regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other retention mandates further raise the stakes, requiring businesses not only to protect their data, but also to know exactly where it lives and how it’s used.
Ghost content falls into three categories, each presenting unique challenges to discovery, access and usability.
Critical business documents such as invoices, purchase orders and contracts often get buried due to inconsistent file naming or poor categorization. Paper records—like student transcripts, building permits or financial statements—locked away in physical storage also fall into this category, making them difficult to retrieve when needed.
Customer records, vendor files, student profiles and financial data often live in isolated systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Student Information System (SIS) platforms, which rarely integrate smoothly due to differences in data formats and limited system interoperability. This siloing makes access difficult, often requiring manual effort or insider knowledge. Additionally, documents stored locally on desktops or shared drives, or in email inboxes, further limit visibility and prevent cross-departmental collaboration.
This includes meeting recordings (with clients, city councils, etc.), imaging files like building plans or healthcare scans, and freeform textual data such as emails and notes. While this information often contains rich insights, it often is underutilized because traditional tools can’t analyze them easily and manual processing is too slow and labor-intensive.
Here’s a simple rule: if you’re spending more than five minutes searching for a piece of data, it’s time to rethink your process.
The good news is solving the ghost content problem doesn’t require a massive system overhaul. With AI-powered tools, organizations can uncover, organize and unlock the value of hidden content already within their systems.
Modern platforms are transforming data management, enabling users across all departments—not just IT or data experts—to quickly find and utilize content more effectively. Take Laserfiche’s Smart Chat where users can ask natural language questions like “What are the key risks in this contract?” or “Summarize this quarter’s financial report,” and get clear answers in seconds rather than hours.
Tools like Laserfiche’s Smart Fields take data management a step further by automatically extracting, classifying, tagging and organizing information into searchable metadata. For example, Smart Fields can capture critical details from handwritten payment checks in multiple formats, enabling accurate income tracking by project, improving cash flow forecasting, creating searchable audit trails and simplifying dispute resolution. Smart Fields can also detect if a document contains PII and identify the type, for either human review or automatic redaction using Laserfiche Workflows.
AI-powered Document Summarization further accelerates productivity by condensing unstructured content such as meeting minutes or video transcriptions into quick, accurate summaries, freeing valuable time for more strategic initiatives. When you use Document Summarization and Smart Chat in conjunction with one another, text of any length, complexity or format quickly turns into actionable information.
As these tools continue to evolve, they do more than just improve efficiency. They pave the way for intelligent process automation across the entire organization. By converting ghost content into structured, actionable information, businesses can streamline operations, empower smarter decision-making and unlock new levels of innovation at scale.
By uncovering ghost content and turning it into actionable information, organizations can move from data overload to insight-driven decision-making. With the right AI-powered tools, what once felt like digital chaos can become a strategic advantage to fuel automation, accelerate workflows and empower teams to focus on what truly matters.
Want to learn more about how to manage your ghost content to process data faster, generate content and extract insights for improved decision making? Read more now.
Records managers might think a 97% storage reduction is impossible. For Brian Mooney, IT director at the Louisiana Patient’s Compensation Fund (PCF), it was a matter of innovative thinking.
The PCF provides medical malpractice coverage for private practitioners and hospitals in the state. On top of this, the organization provides ongoing medical care for injured individuals in medical malpractice cases. With 60 employees, the PCF insures around 28,000 providers and oversees a yearly budget of $150 million.
Protecting providers and ensuring fair compensation for patients creates complex and wide-ranging recordkeeping needs. Manually managing critical and often sensitive information created a logistical headache. This perfect storm drove the team to seek a new solution in Laserfiche.
Today, the PCF uses Laserfiche for a variety of processes, including:
“We’ve always been very happy with Laserfiche and how easy it is to use and store documents,” said Mooney. “We were an early adopter of records retention schedules at a state agency. We’ve been a model for many other agencies looking to modernize their records management.”
At any given time, the PCF covers the medical bills for 50 to 100 patients. Additionally, the PCF may have 4,000 claims open simultaneously, which take an average of three to five years each to close. The sheer amount of paperwork related to these tasks made document storage untenable. File retrieval during audits could take days.
With approval from the Louisiana Secretary, the organization implemented an “imaging exception” that allows scanned documents to be retained digitally through Laserfiche. This system meets state guidelines for secure storage, backup and distribution, facilitating automated retention schedules and reducing physical storage needs by 97%.
Today, staff can navigate the system and retrieve documentation promptly. What previously took days now takes minutes. The organization’s records processing capacity has also doubled. Staff can now process more than 700 claim, panel, and surcharge records per week. And with standardized records management practices, the organization has regained control over its information, mitigating risk of lost files or noncompliance.
The PCF serves both patients injured in medical malpractice cases and the doctors and providers involved in medical malpractice cases. In malpractice cases, the first step involves a medical review panel. The panel’s purpose is to evaluate the case and determine whether malpractice took place.
The PCF staff must retrieve records in a timely manner: Non-compliance with a strict three-day deadline means legal consequences and fees. Mooney and his team transformed this tedious, hours-long search for documents. With all information digitized and centralized in Laserfiche, staff can now easily search and retrieve the documents they need within minutes. This alleviated the stress of working on such a tight deadline and made the organization more responsive.
“We get lots of records requests, and with Laserfiche, the team is able to put them together much better and faster than we used to in the past,” said Mooney.
Laserfiche facilitates the flow of documentation for these panels. Robust security features help the organization maintain and track proper access to sensitive information.
Securing this information long-term is crucial, as malpractice claims panels can take an average of two years to complete.
Since implementing Laserfiche, the PCF has reduced errors, saved staff time and created peace of mind for meeting state-level requirements.
Recently, the PCF set out to further improve its records management. The team, facing high turnover and a growing number of complex documents, needed to quickly bring remaining staff up to speed on the project. PCF again turned to Laserfiche, this time integrating it with Canon IRIS to automate the manual steps associated with indexing employee information.
This project had three goals: Leverage experienced staff, reduce human error and reduce the learning curve for new hires. They started by training the Canon IRISPowerscan system to:
Laserfiche then automatically routes documents to their final Laserfiche folder destination once they are indexed, and triggers notifications for relevant staff.
This automated indexing workflow has vastly improved the PCF’s records management, reducing the risk for error and decreasing onboarding time for new hires. The PCF has also reclaimed staff time through Laserfiche’s scalability and ease of integration.
What started as a simple digitization project used by a handful of people has expanded to an interdepartmental initiative. Mooney and his team’s use of Laserfiche to double claim, panel, and surcharge records processing capacity has inspired new uses, with the transformation of the HR and accounting teams’ workflows on the horizon.
Additionally, Mooney is on the path toward using Laserfiche Forms to digitize and automate the surcharge form process, which would streamline the movement of documents into the PCF’s system and support $80 to $100 million worth of enrollments per year.
As the largest pension fund in Tanzania, the Public Service Social Security Fund (PSSSF) serves a vast membership base of nearly 700,000 individuals across the nation, supported by a staff of 1,000 and numerous financial partners. Formed from the merger of four distinct funds over the past seven years, the organization embarked on an ambitious mission: to become the country’s best provider of public sector pension services. This goal required a significant business reengineering effort, particularly to harmonize disparate systems and automate critical processes. PSSSF’s strategic investment in Laserfiche has proven to be a cornerstone of this transformation, fundamentally reshaping how they manage documents and deliver services.
Before adopting Laserfiche, PSSSF faced significant operational challenges stemming from its historical mergers and a reliance on manual, paper-based processes. Managing an immense volume of member documents was a constant struggle. “We had the challenges of searching documents during our processes, and storage occupied quite a big space. Security of the documents was also a challenge,” explained Erick Kato, director of information communication technology at PSSSF. This led to inefficiencies, delays, and a less-than-ideal experience for both staff and members.
The manual nature of operations meant that processing member benefits could be a lengthy ordeal. “Processing benefits could take up to 60 days in some cases,” Kato said. For members, this led to inconvenience and cost. “Some people used to travel more than 900 kilometers to visit our offices to submit documents or inquire about their benefits.” The organization recognized the need for a solution that could centralize records, streamline workflows and enhance accessibility.
The pension fund undertook a thorough evaluation of various systems before selecting Laserfiche. Their decision was driven by Laserfiche’s proven capabilities in enterprise content management, its user-friendly interface, and its robust capacity for document storage and rapid retrieval. “We found Laserfiche was quite easy to use,” Kato explained. “Laserfiche can also store quite a large number of documents and the searching capabilities, when compared with other systems, are very fast.”
Laserfiche was strategically implemented to become the digital backbone of their operations, with a primary focus on membership and benefit processing and payment. The solution enabled the fund to securely store, classify and easily access member records, which is paramount for a pension fund. “With Laserfiche, we can store members’ records in the way that we want them to be stored — we can classify the information and make it easier for our staff to process payments,” said Neema Kuwite, PSSSF director of finance.
Another key aspect of the solution was seamless integration. “We have integrated [Laserfiche] with our system which processes benefits to create an easy experience and eliminate the need for switching applications,” Kato said. Laserfiche integration extends to other critical business areas, including contract management and procurement, creating a unified digital environment. “These integrations have streamlined processes because you don’t have to move from one system to another. For example, from within our benefit processing system, an employee can access member documents from Laserfiche, which can be checked, processed and routed. Processing becomes very fast and easy.”
Furthermore, Laserfiche supports the fund’s broader automation agenda. “We’re looking forward to having Laserfiche support us in other administrative chains,” said PSSSF CEO Abdul-Razaq Badru. “It will help us implement the full automation program that we are embarking on, which includes connecting internal systems and integrating with larger databases to boost overall efficiency.”
The adoption of Laserfiche has delivered transformative results across the organization, validating PSSF’s investment. These include:
Dramatic time savings: The most significant impact has been on benefit processing times. “Processing benefits used to take up to 60 days, but now it takes about 3 to 5,” said Kato. This 90%-plus reduction in processing time has fundamentally improved service delivery.
Cost savings: Both the organization and its members have realized substantial cost benefits. “We save time and we save people the headache of having to be in the records office looking for documents,” said Kuwite. The shift from paper to digital has also freed up valuable physical space. “Laserfiche has helped us to reduce the space we used to keep those records on paper. We can now use the space to hire more people or rent out to others who need office space. It’s really given us a return on investment.” For members, the ability to apply for benefits online means they don’t have to travel, saving them time and money.
Enhanced customer satisfaction: The ability to process payments quickly and provide online access to records has significantly boosted member satisfaction. “With our members, Laserfiche provides increased customer satisfaction by shortening the time it takes to process benefits,” added Kuwite. A customer survey confirmed this, with results showing members are “so comfortable and happy with our services, and the fact that we can pay them in a timely manner. Laserfiche has played a big role in that.”
Strategic and cultural transformation: Laserfiche has become one of PSSSF’s two core systems, alongside the organization’s ERP. “Laserfiche is going to help us achieve our aim of becoming a fully automated enterprise,” Badru explained. The platform is also fostering a culture of technology-driven, evidence-based decision-making. “It is actually pushing us also to think of how we can take advantage of our existing database and use the data for decision making in the future.”
By strategically implementing Laserfiche, this leading pension fund has successfully navigated the complexities of merging legacy systems and transforming into a highly efficient, member-centric organization. The dramatic reduction in benefit processing times, coupled with significant cost savings and enhanced member satisfaction, underscores Laserfiche’s pivotal role. “Laserfiche solves all your problems in processing, especially if you have significant amounts of manual processes or you’re a semi-automated organization,” said Badru. “Laserfiche takes care of all those manual troubles you have.” Looking ahead, the organization is excited about further integration with AI tools, anticipating an even brighter, more automated future.
As one of Mexico’s leading insurance companies specializing in property, casualty and civil liability insurance, GMX Seguros has prioritized operational excellence and customer experience. Facing the perennial challenges of paper-intensive processes, escalating compliance demands, and the critical need for rapid claims resolution, the insurer sought to replace a legacy document management system with a more robust solution.
The insurer found a solution in Laserfiche, embarking on a journey that has dramatically streamlined operations, cut processing times, and fortified GMX’s position as a market leader. Through the organization’s automation initiatives, the insurer achieved an impressive 75% growth in claims handling capacity and a 20-30% increase in other business areas.
Before adopting Laserfiche, the GMX grappled with a complex web of manual processes and physical documentation. Policy issuance, regulatory compliance and claims handling were bottlenecks that hindered efficiency and customer satisfaction.
“We were generating a lot of paper in different ways,” said Oscar Salgado, CIO at GMX Seguros, describing the sheer volume of paper as about the size of a two-bedroom apartment. This physical footprint wasn’t just about space; it translated into slow, laborious workflows. The claims process, a cornerstone of customer trust, was particularly impacted.
“Claims processing used to take more than 15 days,” Salgado said. Longer timelines in claims processing, however, test customer patience in their time of need.
Beyond operational inefficiencies, the company faced stringent regulatory requirements, such as those from the Comision de Seguros, demanding meticulous collection and secure storage of sensitive customer documents (IDs, proofs of address, financial statements) to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. Managing these crucial personal documents across disparate systems was a significant hurdle.
The insurer began implementing Laserfiche with a focus on policy management, digitally archiving all issued policies and integrating them with a customer portal for easy download. This initial success paved the way for more expansive applications.
A key area of transformation was regulatory compliance. “We need to collect IDs, address, proofs of address, statements — all these documents are personal and sensitive data,” Salgado said. “We store them in Laserfiche, and this helps us organize all the documents within our customer folders.” The centralized, secure repository became indispensable for managing sensitive data and demonstrating compliance.
The most significant impact, however, was felt in claims. The company developed a digital claims solution, which collects all necessary documents from customer and automatically builds a digital file. The GMX team built an integration between Laserfiche and the company’s claims system via Laserfiche API which links every claim document to its corresponding policy and customer file, creating a comprehensive digital record.
The insurer’s use of Laserfiche extends to other departments and critical processes including:
The implementation of Laserfiche yielded immediate and profound benefits, most notably in time savings and operational efficiency.
“The time that we are saving is tremendous,” Salgado explained. The most striking improvement was in claims processing: “Claims that used to take more than 15 days now less than five. In some cases, we can process a claim within the same day.”
This strategic advantage became especially evident during a crisis, when GMX experienced an influx of claims in a short period of time. In 2023, Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco and became the costliest tropical cyclone to strike Mexico on record.
“We had the best turnaround time for claims related to Hurricane Otis,” Salgado said. While competitors struggled to process claims for months, the GMX Seguros’ Laserfiche-powered processes allowed the insurer to pay customers in less than a month. “With this efficiency, we can process more claims in less time.” This increased capacity, he added, amounts to 75% growth in claims handling.
Handling 50,000 – 60,000 claims per year and issuing more than 300 policies per day, GMX employees use Laserfiche on a daily basis to support critical service delivery. Beyond claims, the insurer has experienced 20% – 30% growth in other business areas.
GMX has also implemented Laserfiche to increase efficiency in:
The importance of the company’s standardized document management and automated processes is further magnified by audits, which are done internally as well as by regulatory entities. “We use Laserfiche to review and compile all documentation needed for audits, which used to be a very time consuming process,” Salgado said.
The paper reduction has also liberated valuable physical resources, freeing up office space and allowing for better utilization of facilities.
GMX Seguros has not only automated critical processes like claims, compliance, and policy management but has also built a resilient, highly efficient digital ecosystem. The ability to dramatically reduce claims processing times has translated directly into enhanced customer satisfaction, particularly when responding to high-volume events like natural disasters.
“We have some of the best response times in Mexico,” Salgado said. “Laserfiche is not just a document storage system for us. It’s a competitive advantage.”
